Shepard Fairey Interview
Words by Annie Fox
LL: What was growing up in South Carolina like?
SF: South Carolina is in the South and it is fairly conservative. My mum was head cheerleader and my dad was captain of the football team, they got married. So it was far from cutting-edge culturally. It wasn’t really until I started skateboarding in 1984 that I was really [exposed to] all the culture that I think has made me who I am now. Skateboarding [back] then went hand in hand with punk rock, and so there was this sort of outsider culture with both skateboarding and punk rock. Skateboarding I think is really creative, and it’s aggressive and athletic, but there is also a really creative side to the graphics and the t-shirts, the whole scene. And then the punk rock side of it, there’s all these bands that are questioning the establishment and talking about politics.
As soon as I got into that stuff then I had a huge hunger for sort of connecting with other people that were in that world, and making my own t-shirts and making my own stickers. And finally there was an outlet for my art.
So that’s my background, and my parents hated that stuff, but that kind of got me going making my own t-shirts and my own stencils, I would just cut stencils of the Sex Pistols or the Clash or Jimmy Hendrix, anything that I was into and you could see I’ve evolved very little since then, but [laughs] anyway. Yeah, that was over 20 years ago.
LL: Tell me a little bit about your trip to New York in your freshman year?
SF: Well, I’d been to New York a couple of times before that, [but] prior to living in Rhode Island and going to RISD, I hadn’t really paid close attention to graffiti, because it didn’t really exist in South Carolina. I had watched movies like Beat Street and Break In, and thought that you had to be Black or Latino to do graffiti otherwise you weren’t qualified.
So when I started seeing suburban white kids at RISD that were tagging, and then I went into New York on a school trip and I saw all the amazing pieces from miles outside of the city along the freeway and in really daring spots … I felt like it was really beautiful because New York is such a chaotic city that it just sort of added to the baroque over stimulation of it all in a really organic, cool way. Sometimes I like things that are very clean and nice, and then in other contexts I think dirty and chaotic is amazing, and I just loved the energy of the chaos of all the graffiti around and I felt like there was a passion in the application … And so there was something about it, I didn’t know how it was going to manifest for me, but something about it grabbed a hold of me.
So I went back to Providence and I started paying a little bit more attention to what was going on. There were some Dada art school stickers around and that was one of the things that influenced me to throw my hat into the ring with the Andre sticker. And that wasn’t a very calculated thing, it was really sort of a happy accident.
LL: So you say that what happened with Andre was a happy accident, how then did the manifesto grow out of that?
SF: Well, the manifesto grew out of that because after I had started to put the stickers everywhere, I did pay attention to how they were received. And I feel like I am fairly analytical and observant, and I felt like maybe I was crazy that I thought that issues that were somewhat profound were being raised by a sticker that was really whimsical and silly. Based on my own insecurity that maybe something as spontaneous as the original Andrea sticker could be something more significant, and out of my desire to validate that idea, I went and did some research for one of my classes and I read about phenomenology and felt like the concept of phenomenology was something that the sticker was demonstrating.
And you know there are other things, like I was really into the Sex Pistols and they were really into situationism, and I think it’s very similar … it’s an idea that people get stuck in a routine and they need unique situations to give them a perspective that’s renewed or objectivity about what’s going on around them. And so the Manifesto basically came from that. The rumour was started that the whole project was a grad-school thesis thing, and I’m glad that it has the appearance of being that conceptualised, but it was far from it. I think that people tend to downplay intuition, because it seems like there is more merit to being calculated than to things being random, but that’s just life.
I looked at what was going on and I saw the potential of the project. The more you put something out there the more important it seems, the more important it seems the more people react to it and it gains an actual power. And the more I pushed it the more it sort of manifested into something even beyond what I had predicted, which made me want to push it even further, and that’s been going on for [laughs] 18 years.
LL: How do you define Obey?
SF: I guess the strongest driving principle behind the project is a desire to get people to pay attention to what’s going on around them and to participate in a meaningful way rather than letting things happen to them. So it’s a desire to get people to question everything, everything that’s going on whether it’s laws that are being implemented, advertising they are confronted with, the media or their own personal politics of how they live their lives. That’s why the street art side of it is so important to me because it’s a very, very simple way to, without any sort of red tape or bureaucracy, put something out and find an audience.
What I am doing provides a template for empowerment, and if people decide that creating a website or starting a band or doing a magazine or starting a clothing line is how they want to empower themselves, I still feel like my example could be part of the inspiration. You know, rather than just accepting that maybe ‘oh well, I guess my dreams of doing this or doing that aren’t going to happen’ make it happen, because I feel like; I started with a $4/hr skate shop job, and built something where I get to live my life on my own terms.
And it is soul crushing when I hear people call me a sell-out, because I busted my ass to get it to where I actually make an okay living and get to hire my friends to work with me and have them avoid going through the ten years of poverty I went through because I wanted to live creatively. It is really sad in a lot of ways that some people think that keeping it real is being miserable and having no money. And I’m definitely into proving otherwise.
LL: Why do you think you’ve been branded a sell-out?
SF: I was talking to somebody yesterday and the perception when your profile is high like mine has been within certain scenes for many years now, is that you are financially successful. But at a point when my work was influencing skateboard graphics and stuff that was going on from concert posters and things like that, I was still driving a ratty Honda with 200,000 miles on it – I mean my profile and the influence of my work far exceeded the gains I was making personally from any of it.
I was taking on a lot of commercial work just to survive, but people thought that I was taking on commercial work to kind of sell out and cash in, like ‘oh yeah he’s already got five Ferraris, now he’s got to do an album jacket just to get a sixth’, you know what I mean? And no it wasn’t that at all, it was like just to be able to make enough money to even live, because doing street art and especially on the scale that I’ve done it, it is tonnes of money that’s going out in the stickers and posters and travel and fines and arrests; a lot of money is going out that I will never see again. And it is different from any other art form in that way; most people they make a painting and the gallery gets half and they get the other half, but at more than half of my entire body of work was just being put up on the street, and the other stuff was being sold extremely cheaply.
LL: Do you feel that people have misunderstood your message as being anti-capitalist when maybe it’s not?
SF: Yeah I think there is an assumption that because I’ve critiqued capitalism and critiqued advertising that I’m somehow completely anti. If I didn’t believe in capitalism, I wouldn’t live in the United States, that’s retarded you know?
People like to compartmentalise things and make things black and white, because they are lazy and they don’t look at everything. Even if I believe in capitalism as a system, it’s not perfect and I’m going to point out the things that I think could be improved. And yes the system has a tendency - if you’re an idiot - to exploit your stupidity and benefit the people that are willing to exploit your stupidity. So don’t be a victim … my idea is just to point out that it is necessary to consume with discretion, to not follow the trend just because everyone else is doing it.
I did a series for the E Pluribus Venom at Jonathon’s called ‘two sides to capitalism’ and I printed 20,000 bills. And one side is the good side of capitalism and it’s all about the empowerment of being industrious and building your own way to creating within that system, and then the flip side is the whole ‘you’re a number not a name’, world takeover sort of exploitative side of capitalism. And it’s a very obvious point that it is making that there are pros and cons to everything.
LL: Tell me a little bit about your new show and its name, E Pluribus Venom?
SF: Well, on the US currency there is this Latin phrase, E Pluribus Unum, which means from many one, which was the idea of being united, and so my show E Pluribus Venom is a phonetic wordplay, also I feel that ‘from many one’ is far from true, I think that very few people are totally united behind what the United States is doing, however the government somehow manages to get its agenda pushed through.
I feel like there are a lot of people that are angry about what’s going on, and so there is both the idea of venom in terms of the public reaction to what’s going on, and then the fact that I think that some of the policies are poisonous in sort of a two-way thing. With the work I’m questioning a lot of this monolithic influence that the government has that people don’t seem to question. And then things that are more, not actual laws, but more assumptions about pursuing the American dream, which is really these ideals of Americana that are maybe unattainable.
LL: Before I let you go, are there any plans to visit Australia soon?
SF: You know I don’t have anything lined up. I’ve been to Australia a couple of times and had a really good time; I was in Sydney in either 2003 or 2004 for a big graffiti conference. And also I think it was 2000 or 2001 I was in Melbourne for a week and had a really great time there too. There just hasn’t been anything that’s come my way from Australia in a little while, but I like it there so I would definitely come back if the opportunity presented itself.
Visit our Shepard Fairey Gallery to view selection of images from Shepard Fairey's shows, and his latest work on the street.
Shepard Fairey’s E Pluribus Venom is on at Jonathan Levine Gallery, in NYC until July 21st, visit www.jonathanlevinegallery.com for more information.
Read more about Shepard Fairey on his website www.obeygiant.com
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